Breath Weapon / Literature

• The Adventures of Strong Vanya: Och, a dragon-like monster nicknamed the "Green Devil", can expel out hurricane-force blasts of air. They are powerful enough to uproot trees and bring entire villages down.
• Age of Fire: Dragons breathe fire — or, more specifically, spit it. Their bodies produce a kind of flammable, liquid fat from their meals, which is stored in a specialized bladder; when the dragon wishes to use it, it's mixed with bile from a separate organ, ignited, and sent out from the mouth in a stream of liquid, clinging fire. As a result, however, dragons cannot produce this substance indefinitely — the bladder only stores enough fuel for a few charges, and needs time to refill afterwards.
• Anno Dracula: In "One Thousand Monsters", the vampire murderess Clare Mallinger is eaten from within by a jorogumo larva. However she ends up controlling the creature and evolves into a powerhouse Giant Spider with the ability to breathe out swarms of flesh-ripping vampire butterflies.
• The Atomic Time of Monsters: The T. Rexpy Kaiju, such as Tyrantis, Tyranta and MechaTyrantis, can breathe fire.
• The Book of Dragons:
  • In several stories, the dragons breathe fire in the classic manner.
  • In "The Long Walk", demons can exhale clouds of mist hot enough to boil anything caught in to death.
• Cradle Series: Dragons can of course expel fire from their mouths. However, since dragons are sapient and use the sacred arts to improve themselves, they rarely breathe their fire. Instead, they condense their power into a beam, a Striker technique that even humans can learn. They also typically expel this technique from their hands; a dragon mentions in Wintersteel that she hates expelling it from her mouth because it looks crass, but it does tend to catch humans off-guard because they're so used to dragons avoiding that.
• The Cycle of Fire: The Mharg demons have a breath weapon that reduces all life to slime, and leaves the land barren for decades afterwards.
• Discworld
  • Discworld's noble dragons breath gouts of flame, which would be impossible if they weren't powered by magic and the beliefs of their summoners. Discworld's swamp dragons, on the other hand, breath a gas that ignites once it's safely away from their snouts (or, depressingly frequently, causes them to blow up).
  • The Discworld version of the Chimera has, according to the standard bestiary, "the breathe of a furnace and the temperament of a rubber balloon in a hurricane".
• Dracopedia:
  • Great dragons possess the unique ability to "breathe" fire (as the books note, it would be more appropriate to describe them as spitting fire) by producing a very volatile compound in glands at the sides of their mouths, which bursts into fire on contact with oxygen and which they can spit at a distance of thirty meters. They don't have infinite supplies of this stuff, however, and can typically only manage a single gout per day.
  • Wyrms can exhale clouds of toxic gas.
• Dragon and Damsel: Most dragons, including Azrael, are able to breathe fire. And a painting Bernadette discovers implies that other subspecies of dragon may have different breath weapons, showing a white dragon breathing frost and a yellow dragon breathing lightning.
• Dragon Rider: Silver dragons normally breathe blue fire which seemingly is not hot enough to harm (or possibly they can deliberately vary the temperature) but which heals wounds and undoes enchantments. However, dragons who have been Taken for Granite are left with breath which can turn anyone they flame to stone.
• Dragonriders of Pern: Dragons can breathe fire, as can their fire-lizard ancestors, but as this is a Science Fiction series rather than Fantasy, it has a mundane explanation. They chew a naturally occurring rock, named "firestone", and swallow it into a specialized stomach that mixes the pulverized stone with special acids, creating a pyrophoric gas that can be expelled from the dragons' mouths. Their capacity for this gas is limited, so their riders carry sacks of firestone to resupply them in flight.
• Short story collection The Dream Eaters and Other Stories by Louise Searl has two stories featuring fire-breathing dragons, the titular novella and The Dragon's Claw. The Dream Eaters explains that dragons have a "fire-lung" that produces gas that ignites on contact with air.
• Fablehaven: The Fairy Dragon, Raxtus, feels useless because his breath makes flowers grow. Compared to his father Celebrant, who has at least five separate breath weapons. We see a few dragons breathe fire, but there are also ones that breathe poison or Truth Serum.
• The Faerie Queene: The dragon temporarily defeats the Redcrosse Knight by breathing hellish fire on him, filling him with what the author calls a thousand pains worse than the sufferings Hercules felt before his death.
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Nundu, an African beast resembling a gigantic leopard, spreads virulent disease with its breath.
• A Fantasy Attraction: Aleksandra, a dragon, uses flame breath to get rid of a tribe of ogres.
• Fengshen Yanyi:
  • All Immortals beyond a certain rank can breathe out the deadly True Fire of Samadhi from their open mouths, though they rarely do so in active combat. In a rare defensive example, certain Immortals can spit out golden lotus flowers to block attacks.
  • At least two of Deng Jiugong's officers have the unexplained power of fire-breathing, which they use in combat with great effect.
  • The general Feng Lin has the ability to breathe out a Red Orb coated in black smoke at his foes. A later enemy, the dog demon Dai Li can do the same with a bigger and stronger Red Orb, as he hurt the demigod Nezha (who otherwise no-selled Feng Lin's trick).
  • A surprisingly mundane example from the buffallo demon Jin Dasheng: in battle he can attack by spitting out bezoars from his stomach with enough speed and strength to hurt thougher Immortals.
• The Great Zoo of China: The dragons are confirmed by their Chinese captors to be unable to do this, dismissing it as a myth—until fairly late in the book where it turns out each dragon subspecies has a dominant superking and superemperor that can breath fire.
• The Iron Teeth: Myagnoir the Great Drake has ice breath. He uses it destroy an entire city and the people in it.
• The Kaiju Preservation Society: The kaiju don't normally have a breath weapon, but a kaiju with a damaged bioreactor or impaired air circulation will "vent" — release radioactive flames through its mouth in an attempt to rebalance its internal temperatures. A kaiju that's only venting every half hour or so may recover, one venting every five minutes or less is about to die and anything/anyone in the area should run like hell away. Since in-story the Godzilla movies were based on accidental kaiju crossings to our Earth, this may have inspired Godzilla's radioactive breath weapon.
• A Memoir by Lady Trent: One of the defining traits used to classify an animal as a true dragon rather than simply being dragonlike is the possession of a breath weapon of some sort, referred to in-universe as "extraordinary breath". Among the species depicted in the books, Vystrani balaur breathe a shower of icy particles, Bayembe savannah snakes exhale a cloud of caustic droplets, and Moulish swamp-wyrms breathe out poisonous gas. These exhalations are rarely strong enough to kill a victim outright, and chiefly serve to injure or disorient prey in order to make it easier to take down.
• Miranda, a Norwegian children's book (and its sequel, The King Is Coming), has a smoke-breathing dragon as the Deuteragonist. He explains that the classic fire breath is only done by meat-eating dragons because the meat gives them indigestion. Since this particular dragon is a vegetarian, he only breathes smoke.
• Moongobble and Me:
  • The Dragon of Doom breathes fire, as normal for a dragon.
  • In book 5, the Dangly-Boo vomits magic blasts after eating too much magic, which are strong enough to punch a hole in a stone wall.
• Ology Series:
  • European dragons have the classic fire breath, and marsupial dragons have a weaker flame of their own. Arctic dragons breathe frost instead, while Sargasso dragons spit ink.
  • Among non-dragons, cockatrices can breathe out a fine mist of deadly poison.
• Realm of the Elderlings: Dragons breathe a mist of strong acid.
• Septimus Heap: Dragons breathe flammable gases, and their first breath is also flammable.
• Seraphina: Dragons spew flames.
• Shatter the Sky: The dragons here, as usual, breathe fire. However, they are unharmed by fire themselves.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The chief trait of dragons is that they can breathe fire. Aegon I and his sisters rode three dragons to conquer an entire continent. After Daenerys hatches her three dragons, she begins training them to breathe fire at her command using the Trigger Phrase dracarys. Since they are shoulder-sized at birth, the fire is only capable of burning a single person, but by A Dance with Dragons it is powerful enough to set multiple people on fire. The dragons ridden by Aegon and his sisters could destroy a town-sized castle, though, so Daenerys' dragons may be able to do the same eventually. According to The World of Ice & Fire, the dragons' fire-breathing ability is the result of a hybridization between wyverns (winged reptiles who cannot breathe fire) and firewyrms (wingless reptiles who can breathe fire).
• Tadgifauna: Marcy's Tadgifaun Barghest can spew flames intense enough to melt steel.
• Tales of Kolmar: To the Kantri, fire breaths are something sacred, used to consecrate things, though this doesn't stop them from using it to light comforting fires and expelling it in bursts of emotion, analogous to human laughter and tears.
• Temeraire: Most dragon breeds have no breath weapon, so the ones that do are especially prized:
  • The stars of the British Aerial Corps are its Longwings, who can spit a devastatingly powerful acid from bony nozzles growing from their lower jaws. They have no acid resistance, though, so they have to be careful about it; one unfortunate specimen dissolves its own jaw in a sneezing fit.
  • Some dragon breeds spit poison. Acid spit is noted to be a stronger variant of this ability.
  • Fire breath is exclusive to a few rare breeds like the Kaziliks and the Flamme-de-Gloires, none of which the British possess. It's so powerful an ability that the British Crown pays an unheard-of sum for three Kazilik eggs in Black Powder War.
  • When fully grown, Temeraire himself can roar with enough force to shatter objects and raise mini-tsunamis, which reveals him to be a Chinese Celestial dragon, the rarest of all breeds.
• Tooth and Claw: Dragons only acquire flame as they grow and consume other dragons, be it the corpse of a deceased relative, or smaller dragons showcasing traits that make them "weaklings." Even those dragons that do eventually gain the ability to breathe fire use the ability sparingly, as dragon society considers it best reserved for personal defense or the punishment of a grievous offense.
• Dragons in To Shape a Dragon's Breath don't breath any specific element, not even fire (though their undirected breath is referred to colloquially as "dragonfire"). Undirected breath renders whatever it hits into the raw athers of vetna and kolfni (hydrogen and carbon), or wind and ash; directed, it can fuse and unfuse many known aethers via skiltakraft (such as separating water into its base aethers and recombining it). Some breeds, such as velikolepni, are bred specifically to have a higher talent in skiltakraft, but all dragons are capable of the skill.
• Trapped on Draconica: Dragonkin are humans who were granted powers of the dragons. They have different breath attacks (fire, ice, wind, etc) depending on the dragon they were based on.
• Vainqueur The Dragon: Dragons can exhale jets of whatever element they're aligned with. Fire, ice and acid are among the elements that have been seen.
• Warhammer 40,000: Lord Ebondrake from the Grey Knights novel Hammer of Daemons takes a draconic form and can breathe black flame.
• Whateley Universe: From "Small Mercies", Daryl, thanks to the power of the dragon spirit Steamer, can lift heavy objects, breathe fire, and "when I'm really focused I can turn into a thirty-foot-long dragon for a while."
• Worm: The supervillain Barker can expel clouds of smoke which detonate shortly after being breathed out.
• The Yellow Dwarf includes two giant turkeys that can breathe fire. These turkeys pull the cart of the titular dwarf and the Fairy of the Desert.

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